IoT FEATURE NEWS

Hitachi Announces New IoT Moves at NEXT

Hitachi Vantara, a subsidiary of Hitachi, recently at NEXT 2018, the company’s second annual user conference, unveiled a variety of new enhancements and partnerships designed to help enterprises in the IoT. Hitachi first introduced Hitachi Vantara at NEXT 2017 as a new business entity that delivers business and societal outcomes to enterprises through the power of data.

The new solutions reportedly will help enterprises modernize their data centers, simplify and accelerate their cloud initiatives, enhance data governance and use IoT and analytics to improve maintenance and repair operations across multiple industries.

“In today’s data-driven economy, organizations that are slower to adopt digital strategies will find it challenging to compete and stay relevant,” said Brian Householder, CEO, Hitachi Vantara. “Hitachi Vantara is a data company that gives our customers the combination of trusted solutions and expertise to deliver a return on data at every step of their digital journey.”

The first technology enhancements announced are part of the company’s IT infrastructure portfolio and will help customers modernize data centers as part of digital transformation strategies. These enhancements include Hitachi’s first all-NVMe converged system delivering improved performance and efficiency for customers of Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC (UCP HC) hyperconverged systems. Hitachi also introduced smart data center intelligence and automation for self-optimizing data centers. These advancements are designed to lower data center costs with intelligent SAN optimization, automated provisioning and AI-based cooling optimization.

To help customers control how their data is stored, protected, governed and accessed across workloads and in multicloud environments, Hitachi Vantara introduced updates to its Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) portfolio.

“As more enterprises embark on data center modernization initiatives, they’re looking to leverage hyperconverged infrastructures for greater flexibility, increased agility and simpler deployment and management,” said Mike Leone, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Hitachi Vantara’s continued investment in its core infrastructure products and technologies, such as the new all-flash NVMe hyperconverged system, will play a significant role in ensuring organizations are realizing the full value of their hyperconverged platforms for driving digital transformation and ‘cloud-like’ IT.”

The Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) family of converged, hyperconverged and rack-scale systems is designed to provide customers with simplified platforms of pre-tested and validated compute, network and storage that are fast to deploy and easy to manage and expand based on changing business requirements.

The UCP Advisor IT management and orchestration software will include new deployment manager functionality that builds on the simplified, automated management and orchestration of UCP Advisor. With automated, rule-based deployment and validation software, the UCP Advisor deployment manager automates hundreds of manual tasks and can reduce deployment times from multiple days to as little as a few hours.

Hitachi Unified Compute Platform CI (UCP CI) systems include new support for Hitachi Advanced Server DS7000 series servers for the most demanding scale-up workloads, including SAP and Oracle environments, and the Hitachi Advanced Server DS225 with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs for specialized graphics needs including VDI, CAD, collaborative workplaces and advanced analytics.

Hitachi Solution for Databases, powered by UCP systems, expands customer choice for both optimizing and scaling performance of the data infrastructure in critical Oracle environments.

Oracle Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) optimization is enhanced with the addition of Hadoop as an offload target. By allowing cold data from a production Oracle EDW to be offloaded to Hadoop, the data set is reduced, resulting in improved EDW performance and lower software licensing costs by minimizing the number of licenses needed for primary database data. In addition, Oracle customers deploying the most mission-critical, high-performance database and application environments can now use UCP CI configurations with Hitachi DS7000 series servers to provide the scalability and performance that modern digital businesses require.

“Hitachi Vantara is committed to providing customers of our IT infrastructure products and solutions with the latest technology innovations to address their evolving business and data requirements with new levels of efficiency, agility and management simplicity,” said Bob Madaio, VP, Infrastructure Solutions Marketing, Hitachi Vantara. “With these latest advancements across our leading converged and hyperconverged systems portfolio, we continue to provide customers with an unmatched choice of optimized systems and validated solutions to maximize ROI and unlock data-driven insights for better business outcomes.”

The company also announced enhancements to Hitachi Enterprise Cloud (HEC) Container Platform that enhance Hitachi’s managed cloud services offerings. New security, simplified multicloud management and faster deployment and management of Kubernetes container environments help customers simplify and accelerate their cloud initiatives. These enhancements reportedly help enterprises deliver business outcomes by maximizing the power of data no matter where it resides – from the data center to the cloud and out to the edge – and move them forward in today’s digital, data-driven business landscape.

Hitachi Vantara is partnering with Aqua Security to add comprehensive security capabilities to the HEC Container Platform service that enable customers to safely move their mission-critical applications to an agile, cloud-native platform. The collaboration delivers a comprehensive, managed and pre-engineered, end-to-end container solution designed to provide unmatched security for DevOps and data services through enhanced visibility and control of container activity.

Aqua Security adds capabilities to the HEC Container Platform service including run-time protection, encryption, vulnerability scanning and micro-segmentation for a solution that detects and prevents suspicious activity and attacks while providing transparent, automated security and simplifying enforcement of corporate security policies and regulatory compliance.

“We are pleased to collaborate with Hitachi Vantara to help ensure the security of data in containerized applications for customers leveraging the Hitachi Enterprise Cloud Container Platform,” said Dror Davidoff, CEO, Aqua Security. “Aqua’s cloud-native security platform provides full visibility and comprehensive protection over containerized environments, with security controls and intrusion prevention capabilities at any scale. As an MSP Partner in our Aqua Link Partner Program, Hitachi Vantara eases the path to more centralized management of container deployments and accelerates customer deployments.”

HEC Container Platform also adds support for multicloud management to deliver transparent visibility through a single cloud management interface, reducing risks, costs and time to value by helping customers manage multiple cloud implementations simultaneously. Customers get improved visibility of private, hybrid and public cloud deployments with the ability to run application workloads in these disparate environments without the need to adapt applications to proprietary public cloud APIs, interfaces and methods, reducing lock-in concerns.

“Customers are facing an increased need to ensure the security of their container-based applications from development to production as well as enabling developers to become more productive with self-service access to DevOps tools and data services,” said Bobby Soni, chief solutions and services officer, Hitachi Vantara. “In collaboration with Aqua Security, HEC Container Platform’s enhanced security capabilities increase control over cloud resources allowing customers to meet security and compliance audits. With added self-service Kubernetes capabilities and an enhanced range of DevOps and data services, organizations will achieve greater agility in delivering the infrastructure and application services they need to empower developers, without compromising on security and service levels.”

Ken Briodagh is a writer and editor with more than a decade of experience under his belt. He is in love with technology and if he had his druthers would beta test everything from shoe phones to flying cars.